Decline can be avoided.
Decline can be detected.
Decline can be reversed.
Amidst the desolate landscape of fallen great companies, Jim Collins
began to wonder: How do the mighty fall? Can decline be detected early
and avoided? How far can a company fall before the path toward doom
becomes inevitable and unshakable? How can companies reverse course?
In How the Mighty Fall, Collins confronts these questions, offering
leaders the well-founded hope that they can learn how to stave off
decline and, if they find themselves falling, reverse their course.
Collins' research project--more than four years in duration--uncovered
five step-wise stages of decline:
Stage 1: Hubris Born of Success
Stage 2: Undisciplined Pursuit of More
Stage 3: Denial of Risk and Peril
Stage 4: Grasping for Salvation
Stage 5: Capitulation to Irrelevance or Death
By understanding these stages of decline, leaders can substantially
reduce their chances of falling all the way to the bottom.
Great companies can stumble, badly, and recover.
Every institution, no matter how great, is vulnerable to decline. There
is no law of nature that the most powerful will inevitably remain at the
top. Anyone can fall and most eventually do. But, as Collins' research
emphasizes, some companies do indeed recover--in some cases, coming back
even stronger--even after having crashed into the depths of Stage 4.
Decline, it turns out, is largely self-inflicted, and the path to
recovery lies largely within our own hands. We are not imprisoned by our
circumstances, our history, or even our staggering defeats along the
way. As long as we never get entirely knocked out of the game, hope
always remains. The mighty can fall, but they can often rise again.
